Vine, the ultra-short form video-sharing platform launched in 2013, produced many unlikely cultural fixations among its mostly Generation Z and late-millennial user base. Among these was the video created by user Josh Kennedy, who, for reasons still mysterious to many, uploaded a video in which he uttered “waddup, I’m Jared, I’m 19, and I never fucking learned how to read.” The rest is internet history, and many of us still drop the phrase on occasions we deem appropriate.

While a deep dive into how Kennedy came up with the phrase and why it became so popular would indeed be a vexing topic for an article, I wish to discuss a much more mundane one: the fact that it is not just “Jared” who can’t “fucking read” — it’s most of us and it ought to be concerning to us all. 

It’s neither revolutionary nor original to blame this generation of students’ many shortcomings on standardized testing. We’ve heard all the arguments before: tests reduce a student’s profile to a set of numbers that don’t capture all they have to offer, make teachers miserable, and produce inequity in classrooms. Yes, trés tragique. But we’ve heard it all before, and the College Board still has influence on par with Xi Jinping at a G20 summit in college admissions — so let’s get real.

In the next 1,000 words, I want to discuss a negative outcome of the standardized testing regime that we don’t often hear about, yet is nonetheless among the regime’s most prolonged, destructive consequences: reading. Students don’t know how to read anymore and universities — with their sorry excuses for first-year writing seminars — do little to nothing to get them to a place where they can.

Now what do I mean by the theatrical phrase, “students don’t know how to read?” I’m going to take the liberty to assume that you, dear reader, are most likely a student, because I doubt that faculty or the administration are concerned with what a presumably degenerate undergraduate has to say about this matter. So, let’s get personal: when was the last time you read word-by-word, line-by-line, a text that was, let’s say, 30 or 40 pages? I assume this is where the crickets start chirping. I’m going to take more liberty to assume that it was not anytime in the recallable past. 

I’m a humanities and a joke of a social sciences student, so I can only really speak for this crowd, but it’s no secret that many to (Hashem, I hope not) most undergraduates don’t do their assigned readings. Contingent on their discipline and their faculty’s pedagogical methods, students who are assigned scholarly articles can expect these texts to be between 20-40 pages in length, buttressed by intricate arguments, and filled with discipline-specific jargon. Some students don’t have the time to do this reading; others simply don’t care to do it. Nonetheless, even the ones that do likely don’t have the tools required for understanding this kind of text. This is not to even mention longer texts, such as novels or long-form historical accounts. 

Students learn to test. We know that much, but what we don’t often talk about is that students also read to test. What this looks like in the real world is students reading short paragraphs or “selections” from a text, analyzing it with what could only be likened to a literary microscope, and abandoning the text once they’ve struck thematic gold. While this pedagogy trains a student to be a literary archeologist of sorts, it does little to train them in the art of longevity. Long sessions of active reading accompanied by passive analysis, allowing one to understand the text in its entirety and not simply in its “digest” version, has become an archaic virtue.

We often talk about how TikTok and the attention economy is rotting our brains’ capacity to focus on one task for an extended period, yet we don’t realize that the area in which our ever-decreasing attention spans perform worst is in the activity we, as students, should find ourselves doing most — reading. And yet, we don’t do it.

In response to this crisis in students’ competence, some faculty have resorted to assigning shorter readings: news articles, excerpts, etc. In my view, this is disgraceful. I appreciate that it is not a university professor’s job to be a high school English teacher, but deliberately assigning less challenging work in the hopes that students will do it sends the worst possible message to young, impressionable youth with underdeveloped frontal cortices. We do not need to be told, “Reading Plato’s Republic is too difficult, so read this 750-word summary by some half-rate writer whose book you’ve never heard of instead.” There are better ways to spend $70,000 in nine months, folks. 

I can anticipate the response from the faculty I just depicted, “Motek, I have tenure and a book to write; have the UWS people teach these imbeciles to read.” And while I do agree with this ventriloquized faculty member, if this crisis is anyone’s responsibility to ameliorate, it is the people whose only job is to ensure students are prepared for college-level writing and reading. But if anyone on this campus has faith in UWS’s capacity to teach first-years an effective lesson about the English language and how to use it, please send them my way. I would like to ascertain where exactly their belief system has gone awry to the extent that they seem to have lost touch with reality.

I say all of this with genuine sadness for my comrades. Unlike most, much of my first year of university was spent with my nose in a book or glued to a laptop screen. I say this not to brag — it’s not exactly cool to be so dedicated to your studies that you become antisocial. I mention this because despite being more dedicated than most to doing the work I was assigned, I did not truly understand most of what I read. Part of this was due to a genuine lack of exposure to the high-level of scholarship I am  now confronted with regularly, but a bigger part of it was attributable to the lack of analytical tools that I had at the time. I did not attend private schools prior to college, and the public education I did receive left much to be desired. I understand the absolute terror one experiences when trying to decipher what on earth is going on when trying to read Hobbes for the first time. It’s not the nicest of feelings, and although I do not think this challenge can (nor should it) be entirely eradicated, it can be ameliorated when one approaches text with proper tools of analysis. 

Equipping students with helpful tools is about half the battle; the rest truly is up to students. I think we’ve been lulled into the belief that reading long, hard texts is not something we’re capable of doing and so we should just stick to selections and whatever BookTok has recommended us for the hour. Fellas, no. You are capable of reading Plato, Hobbes and all the other dead white European men who had something half-important to say 300 years ago. But it takes work, it’s not a simple affair and will take more than a single skim.